PAUL’S ESTIMATE OF HIMSELF

   ’By the grace of God I am what I am:  and His grace
   which was bestowed upon me was not in vain.’—­1 COR. xv. 10.

The Apostle was, all his life, under the hateful necessity of vindicating his character and Apostleship.  Thus here, though his main purpose in the context is simply to declare the Gospel which he preached, he is obliged to turn aside in order to assert, and to back up his assertion, that there was no sort of difference between him and the other recognised teachers of Christian truth.  He was forced to do this by persistent endeavours in the Corinthian Church to deny his Apostleship, and the faithfulness of his representation of the Christian verities.  The way in which he does it is eminently beautiful and remarkable.  He fires up in vindication of himself; and then he checks himself.  ’By the grace of God I am’—­and he is going to say what he is, but he bethinks himself, as if he had reflected; ’No!  I will leave other people to say what that is.  By the grace of God I am—­what I am, whatever that be.  And all that I have to say is that God made me, and that I helped Him.  For the grace of God which was bestowed upon me was not in vain.  You Corinthians may judge what the product is.  I tell you how it has come about.’  So there are thoughts here, I think, well worth our pondering and taking into our hearts and lives.

I. First, as to the one power that makes men.

‘By the grace of God I am what I am.’  Now that word ‘grace’ has got to be worn threadbare, and to mean next door to nothing, in the ears and minds of a great many continual hearers of the Gospel.  But Paul had a very definite idea of what he meant by it; and what he meant by it was a very large thing, which we may well ponder for a moment as being the only thing which will transform and ennoble character and will produce fruit that a man need not be ashamed of.  The grace of God, in Paul’s use of the words, which is the scriptural use of them generally, implies these two things which are connected as root and product—­the active love of God, in exercise towards us low and sinful creatures, and the gifts with which that love comes full charged to men.  These two things, which at bottom are one, love and its gifts, are all, in the Apostle’s judgment, gathered up and stored, as in a great storehouse, in Jesus Christ Himself, and through Him are made accessible to us, and brought to bear upon us for the ennobling of our natures, and the investing of us with graces and beauties of character, all strange to us apart from these.

Now it seems to me that these two things, which come from one root, are the precise things which you and I need in order to make us nobler and purer and more Godlike men than otherwise we could ever become.  For what is it that men need most for noble and pure living?  These two things precisely—­motive and power to carry out the dictates of conscience.